A timely intervention from global popular perspectives to decenter the discussion on socio-technical futures.

Technology has the power to colonize our visions of the future. But those visions are always socially situated, relational, and enmeshed in societal sense-making from the past to the present. It is this social embedding that has the power to bring future ideas into material existence. How do communities around the world rethink techno-futures through friction, re-appropriation, spirituality and, possibly, wholesome change? This issue brings together articles exploring popular techno-futures from international and interdisciplinary perspectives, including cultural and media studies, science and technology studies, and related disciplines. The contributors decenter the discussion on socio-technical futures and the role of popular culture, aesthetics and media in their (re)production.

Autorentext

Jascha Bareis (Edited by)
Jascha Bareis is a political scientist whose passion lies at the crossroads of academic AI research, political communication and future studies. He holds a Dr. phil. from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and is a senior researcher at Universität Freiburg. He analyzes and comments on the politics of hype, AI, tech oligarchy, and the field of autonomous weapons. Other fields of expertise include technology assessment, trust and technology and democratic theory. Anya Heise-von der Lippe (Edited by)
Anya Heise-von der Lippe is an assistant lecturer at the Chair of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures of the English Department at Universität Tübingen, where she completed her PhD. She earned der postdoctoral degree (habilitation) at Universität Potsdam in 2023. Her research interests include narratives of techno-futures, climate change literature and intersectional feminist approaches to the critical posthumanities. Felix Spremberg (Edited by)
Felix Spremberg holds the position of a postdoc fellow at the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. He earned his PhD for a dissertation on social democracy in Japan from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and has worked as a research associate and lecturer at the Department of Japanese Studies at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He is interested in the interplay of political ideologies, digitalization, and popular culture in Japan.